Mandela: saintly but also flawed

On June 16, 2011, Julius Malema, the enfant terrible of South African politics, walked out onto the stage at a conference of the African National Congress Youth League. Invoking the name of
Nelson Mandela
, he shook up the 5000-strong conference with radical calls for white­ land to be seized and mines to be nationalised.

It was Mandela and his comrades, he recalled, who, in the 1940s, rose up against the professorial leaders of the ANC and turned the party from a supplicant to the British Empire into a fighting force. Malema claimed that the militant ANC Youth League he led – formed by Mandela and others in 1944 – was the true embodiment of who Mandela was.

“(This) is a clarion call to the whole nation that we should fight with the determination, consistency, honesty, love and passion of Nelson Mandela to ensure that our total freedom is realised. Political power without economic emancipation is meaningless!" he railed.

Those who revere Mandela as the father of reconciliation between blacks and whites greeted Malema’s use of the South African leader’s name with howls of indignation. Mandela, the saint, should not be claimed by a radical, they said.

But as Mandela’s 95th birthday approaches in July, it is worth remembering a different man from the “saint". This is the Mandela who was radical, hotheaded and flawed. The image of the saintly Mandela was appropriate for South Africa’s troubled 1990s but the more complex man, the one that Malema tried to emulate, is the real Mandela.

He was radicalised in the 1940s and remained that way into the 1950s and ‘60s. A lacuna in the explanations of Mandela is how he became the man who emerged from Victor Verster Prison in 1990, smiling beatifically after 27 years behind bars, his hand held out to whites.

Adaptability is key to Mandela, a trait that his friend Walter Sisulu recognised instantly when the young man arrived at his real estate office as an ANC recruit in 1941: “I was also encouraged by his ability to change, by his attitude to people."

Together, over 20 years, these two men, both keen disciples of Gandhi, would take the ANC into armed struggle. What drove a real estate agent and a young lawyer to undergo such a drastic change?

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In his first speech to Parliament as the new prime minister in 1948, the Afrikaner nationalist leader D.F. Malan made it clear that a new direction was in store for South Africa.

“Mr. Speaker, today South Africa belongs to us. We shall be introducing legislation to implement our policy – which we call ‘apartheid,’ the separation between the races. Races will live and travel separately. Education will be separate for all groups at all levels. Work fitting for the white man will be reserved for him and him alone."

Malan was confirming what a young Mandela and his comrades had feared since the early 1940s: that the victory of the National Party in 1948 would bring with it a harsher and more degrading form of racial oppression.

The ANC of the early 1940s that Mandela joined had become a rich black man’s debating society. Formed in 191­2 as the first national liberation organisation for blacks and led by black lawyers, teachers and doctors, the party had lost its fighting spirit and posed no threat to the colonial system.

But it was at this time that Sisulu, then secretary of the ANC, started bringing bright, militant young activists like Mandela into the party. In 1944 these Young Turks formed the ANC Youth League, which brought militant demands to the main party. Mandela was in the national executive of the league, eventually rising to become its secretary. He was influenced by the “Africanist" stance of the African nationalists who opposed any form of a racially united front against ­colonialism.

Malan’s promise of segregation began biting in 1950 as the South African Parliament introduced apartheid laws. Those included the Population Registration Act, which classified people by race and extended the prohibition of mixed marriages, and the Group Areas Act, which classified all areas by function and race and introduced “whites only" signs on amenities across the country.

“Grand apartheid" had begun, and it had two profound effects on Mandela and the ANC over the next decade. First, it instilled a pragmatic attitude toward those who became involved in the struggle. Second, it became increasingly clear that strikes and marches were having no effect on the apartheid government.

Mandela was elected volunteer in chief of the “defiance campaign" launched in June 1952, which catapulted him into the national limelight. He became the party’s chief spokesman, and the public face of its campaign to defy the new apartheid laws through protests and marches.

Through the decade, Mandela became the ANC’s battering ram as he became the proponent of more militant action against the apartheid state.

On June 26, 1955, the ANC signed the most important document in its 101-year history. The Freedom Charter was signed while Mandela, Sisulu and other ANC leaders, banned by the apartheid government, watched from the roof of a nearby store.

Its first line resounds with the non-racial, democratic ethos that was to hold the ANC together through three decades of exile and imprisonment.

It said: “We, the people of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know: that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people."

This embrace of all races is a remarkable change from Mandela’s earlier Africanism that saw a black-only struggle as crucial. His speech during the Rivonia Trial in 1964, at which he was sentenced to life in prison, suggests an explanation for this change of heart. It also partly explains his problem with his subsequent canonisation:

It is perhaps difficult for white South Africans, with an ingrained prejudice against communism, to understand why experienced African politicians so readily accept communists as their friends. ... For many decades communists were the only political group in South Africa who were prepared to treat Africans as human beings and their equals.

In this testament, Mandela had shown his willingness and capacity to adapt.

In February 1960, the British prime minister Harold Macmillan told the Parliament of South Africa: “The wind of change is blowing through this continent. And whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact."

But Mandela and his compatriots realised that power would remain held by the Afrikaner rather than the black majority. In 1961, with the ANC banned and police repression at its most intensive, Mandela chose to lead the ANC into a fight against the apartheid government.

Mandela was chosen as the first commander in chief of the MK, the ANC’s military wing, and his influence grew substantially within the party. At his trial, Mandela told the court:

I do not, however, deny that I planned sabotage . . . we felt that without violence there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy.

On December 16, 1961, MK activists bombed government targets in Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth and Durban. Mandela was arrested the following year and went to prison for 27 years, feared and reviled by white South Africa. To rescue South Africa from the despair of the apartheid era, Mandela had to focus on one core belief.

Throughout his journey from herd boy in the 1920s to statesman in the 1990s, as he put it in his first speech to Parliament as president in 1994, he always felt “that our endeavours must be about the liberation of the woman, the emancipation of the man and the liberty of the child".

For this idea he was prepared to do anything, including changing strategy, tactics – and himself.

At the Rivonia Trial, Mandela threw down the gauntlet:

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

This confrontational image is the Mandela that so many of us refuse to honour. For a single idea, Mandela was prepared to sacrifice ideology and politics, to adapt in a way that modern radicals, such as Malema, are not.

The radical period of the 1950s and 1960s was crucial in shaping the man that Mandela became. To ignore his militant moment and see only the latter-day saint is to do Mandela and ourselves a great disservice.